The result of the Sunday vote didn’t surprise me at all. The surprise had been in the weeks before that, when I’ve been surprised about the intensity of the anti-EU-constitution campaign. All the young French students I know were definitely on the NO side.

Their enthusiasm for the “NO” greatly contrasted with their obvious enthusiasm to the idea of an united Europe. On Friday, coming from work, when I ran in the RER into a french student friend living in the same student residence, I asked him about the reasons of his generation voting for the “NO”.

His answer was a firm one, he was really feeling strong about the ideas running in the NO propaganda, although I guess that he hadn’t read the Constitution proposal(on the other hand, I guess many of the EU-parliament members haven’t read it either).

He said that the EU Constitution had been designed on the grounds of liberal and right-wing ideology, deeply contrasting with the French social, left-wing one. A Constitution, as he said, should impose a “moral” basic set of principles and guiding lines, on which the forecoming laws should rely. With a liberal constitution, the power of any social government to come was deeply restrained, compared to the increased power of the liberal governments. I can see why many young ideologists feel strong against a liberal constitution. It is the “esprit de fronde”, the “revolutionary” spirit of the youth who want to save the world from tirany. I deeply support this spirit, as most of the young people do, since I feel that the power of the people has been lost and there has been a return to the power of the wealthy industrialists, lawyers or politicians. Kind of like the power of the aristocracy, untouchable by laws and exploiting the poor.

But this vote was not a vote for changing things, and that’s the problem. It was all about stagnation. Saying No to change is never a progress. A global constitution, as rotten as may be, can be changed more easily and yield more power than the separate ones. The EU governed by the same laws will be more flexible and can be made into a better place.

I fear that the enthusiastic NO-French have been tricked. They have been manipulated into believing that they can really change the world into a better place just by saying NO. Instead, they played the chords of the opposition left parties and the extreme-right wing. The former, menacing with the loss of jobs because of a EU without social protection. The later, menacing with the loss of jobs due to EU immigrants and delocalisation. All of it just to make Chirac lose face in front of the EU leaders, and to call for premature ellections.

Pe vremea asta…

• 2006: La multi ani

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